China weary of North Korea behaving like spoiled child
China weary of North Korea behaving like spoiled child.
The 2 Koreas should be UNIFIED. We may not like them but they are a neighbour.
China is preparing to handle unrest after collapse of the NK regime.
I posted this on WATCH CHINA thread
http://cj.myfreeforum.org/about304.html

U.S. looks for way to prosecute over leaks
Clinton says WikiLeaks acted illegally; soldier in earlier leak already charged

There is no doubt in my mind Obama personally authorized these leaks.

November 30, 2010 Tuesday

Obama mafia branded the WikiLeaks release of more than a quarter-million sensitive files an attack on the United States Monday and raised the prospect of criminal prosecutions in connection with the exposure.
The Pentagon detailed new security safeguards, including restraints on small computer flash drives, to make it harder for any one person to copy and reveal so many secrets.

The young Army Pfc. suspected of stealing the diplomatic memos, many of them classified, and feeding them to WikiLeaks may have defeated Pentagon security systems using little more than a Lady Gaga CD and a portable computer memory stick.

The soldier, Bradley Manning has not been charged in the latest release of internal U.S. government documents. But officials said he is the prime suspect partly because of his own description of how he pulled off a staggering heist of classified and restricted material.

"No one suspected a thing," Manning told a confidant afterward, according to a log of his computer chat published by Wired.com. "I didn't even have to hide anything."
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted Monday that WikiLeaks acted illegally in posting the material. She said the administration was taking "aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information."

AG Eric Holder (yawn) said the government was mounting a criminal investigation, and the Pentagon was tightening access to information, including restricting the use of computer storage devices such as CDs and flash drives.
"This is not saber-rattling," Holder said. Anyone found to have broken American law "will be held responsible."

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., calls the so-called WikiLeaks scandal "worse than a military attack."
If that's true, it has given us an idea of how Barack Obama's administration might respond in the event of an actual military attack.
Attorney General Eric Holder (yawn) has ordered a criminal investigation.

That's just what Bill Clinton did when Muslim terrorists first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. He treated it like it was a random street crime. And the result of that massive error was the destruction of the World Trade Center and 3,000 lives eight years later in the worst attack ever perpetrated on the U.S.

But this mistake is bigger and in many ways worse that Clinton's. Because these leaks are a symptom of a national-security nightmare of Obama's own making.
Only an administration with no respect for security secrets could permit such bungling to begin with. And Obama shows no signs of figuring out what is wrong within his own government.

America is a laughingstock around the world today as a result of this breakdown in national security. Der Spiegel calls the leaks "a political meltdown for American foreign policy."

"Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information. ..." said the German magazine. "Never before has the trust America's partners have in the country been as badly shaken." The British paper the Guardian wrote: "The impression is of the world's superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden."

Yes, Mr. Obama, there are bad guys out there in the world who have no use for the United States – even with you at the helm.

One of those facing charges is Pfc. Bradley Manning – a young man who should not have been in the Army because he was a homosexual. Yet, he was not only permitted to serve, he was provided access to top national-security secrets, hundreds of thousands of classified documents, which he released to WikiLeaks.org.
This was a kid who, according to the New York Times, was defined by his homosexuality from a young age. His friends in the Army knew he was a homosexual. But nobody asked and nobody told.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=234429

Leaked diplomatic correspondence points to growing American qualms over Kremlin motives, attitudes.
United States Embassy in Moscow sent to Washington in 2009 a cable summarizing whispers within Russia’s political class. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, the rumors said, often did not show up at his office.

The embassy titled the cable “Questioning Putin’s Work Ethic.”
“There are consistent reports that Putin resents or resists the workload he carries,” it said, citing Mr. Putin’s “fatigue,” “hands-off behavior” and “isolation” to the point that he was “working from home.”

The cable, approved by the American ambassador, John R. Beyrle, assessed the Kremlin rumors not as indicators of Mr. Putin’s weakness, but of the limits of his position in a period of falling commodity prices and tightening credit. Russia’s most powerful man sat atop Russia’s spoils. The recession left him with less to dole out, eroding “some of his Teflon persona.”

“His disengagement reflects,” the cable concluded, “his recognition that a sharp reduction in resources limits his ability to find workable compromises among the Kremlin elite.” Officially, the United States has sought since last year what President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri A. Medvedev, have called a “reset” in relations.

American cables from recent years, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations, show that beneath the public efforts at warmer ties, the United States harbors a dim view of the post-Soviet Kremlin and its leadership, and little hope that Russia will become more democratic or reliable.

The cables portray Mr. Putin as enjoying supremacy over all other Russian public figures, yet undermined by the very nature of the post-Soviet country he helped build.
Even a man with his formidable will and intellect is shown beholden to intractable larger forces, including an inefficient economy and an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores his edicts.

In language candid and bald, the cables reveal an assessment of Mr. Putin’s Russia as highly centralized, occasionally brutal and all but irretrievably cynical and corrupt. The Kremlin, by this description, lies at the center of a constellation of official and quasi-official rackets.

Throughout the internal correspondence between the American Embassy and Washington, the American diplomats in Moscow painted a Russia in which public stewardship was barely tended to and history was distorted. The Kremlin displays scant ability or inclination to reform what one cable characterized as a “modern brand of authoritarianism” accepted with resignation by the ruled.

Moreover, the cables reveal the limits of American influence within Russia and an evident dearth of diplomatic sources. The internal correspondence repeatedly reflected the analyses of an embassy whose staff was narrowly contained and had almost no access to Mr. Putin’s inner circle.
Story: Colin Powell promotes START nuclear pact

In reporting to Washington, diplomats often summarized impressions from meetings not with Russian officials, but with Western colleagues or business executives. The impressions of a largely well-known cadre of Russian journalists, opposition politicians and research institute regulars rounded out many cables, with insights resembling what was published in liberal Russian newspapers and on Web sites.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40459874/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times
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Besieged by a barrage of WikiLeaks revelations, the State Department on Tuesday shut down all access to its secret government documents for fear that they could be stolen and posted on the Internet.
The move signaled increased concern over how a quarter-million sensitive diplomatic cables could be spirited away, apparently by a 22-year-old private first class who, according to the British Guardian newspaper, saved the data onto a Lady Gaga CD.

Knowledgeable foreign-policy experts found the disclosures to be rather pedestrian. But the scope and breadth of the leaks, as well as the global diplomatic repercussions, sent the State Department reeling.
Spokesman P.J. Crowley said the decision to block access to documents will continue until a fix can be found for what he termed "weaknesses in the system that have become evident because of this leak.”

The scope of the security lapse is in some ways unprecedented. The German Der Spiegel magazine wrote: “Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information -- data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which U.S. foreign policy is built.

“Never before has the trust America's partners have in the country been as badly shaken. Now, their own personal views and policy recommendations have been made public -- as have America's true views of them.”

The State Department’s action will cut off access to files classified as “secret.” Ordinarily, some 3 million federal employees have access to them.
If other agencies follow suit, and the restrictions continue for an extended period, national security experts worry it could have profound implications in the war against terror.
For the first time, the leak indicates that the post-9/11 dictum of widespread intelligence sharing may leave the United States correspondingly more vulnerable to espionage and breaches of security.

“The whole post-911 mantra was the need to share, the need to share, the need to share,” says Heritage Foundation foreign-policy expert James Carafano.
“All that is going to be great, until some share gives up to an al-Qaida operative all the intel he got from DHS.
“This was going to happen eventually,” he tells Newsmax. “… The need to share is far more important than all the [intelligence] compromises.”

Carafano and other experts tell Newsmax that the concerted effort to distribute intelligence broadly across a large number of security agencies -- one of the key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission – inevitably increases security risks.

Mark Lowenthal, the president of the Reston, Va.-based Intelligence & Security Academy, tells Newsmax that it is impossible to share information across silos without security issues.

“The mantra here is share, share, share,” says the former assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production. “We’ve gone from need to know, to need to share, to responsibility to provide -- which is the current metric that was created by [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell, and not rolled back by either [Director of National Intelligence Dennis] Blair or [DNI James] Clapper. So if you want people to share and provide, then this all has to be available.”

While there are physical methods of preventing staff from bringing CDs or thumb drives to their workplace, Lowenthal says that enforcing those restrictions are onerous.

“Clearly they’ve had a breakdown,” says Lowenthal. “Downloading 250,000 documents is no small issue. That’s a lot of downloading, and the fact that nobody caught him is a bit embarrassing.”
But stopping leaks is difficult, when so many people have access to the information, he says.

“If you want to roll it back to where we have strict compartmentalization, you can do that,” says Lowenthal. “Now we’re back in the situation where everyone is in these little silos, and nobody knows what everybody else is doing. This is the problem with the world we live in – those are your choices and they aren’t pretty.”
Lowenthal, like Carafano, would rather err on the side of stopping the next major terrorist attack.

Pakistan wants contacts with Israel to remain secret in order not to anger anti-government Muslim militants.
The chief of Pakistan's spy agency said he had contacted Israeli officials to head off potential attacks on Israeli targets in India, according to an October 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks.

Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, told former U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson that he wanted Washington to know he had been to Oman and Iran "to follow up on reports which he received in Washington about a terrorist attack on India."

"Pasha asked Ambassador to convey to Washington that he had followed up on threat information that an attack would be launched against India between September-November.
He had been in direct touch with the Israelis on possible threats against Israeli targets in India," the Oct 7, 2009 cable reported.
A Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence spokesman had no immediate comment.

Israel's anti-terrorism headquarters publicized a severe travel warning for Israelis, especially those planning to enter India only one week later, on October 15, 2009. That travel warning specified that there was a very real concrete threat of an attack on Israelis in India.

The travel warning of October 15 was a ramping up of a previous travel warning issued on the eve of the Rosh Hashanah holiday in September 2009, which conveyed fears of an attack against Israelis throughout India.

The anti-terrorism headquarters announced at that time that the terror organization that had carried out the most lethal terror attack in Mumbai in November 2008 was planning a series of attacks throughout India, especially in locations with large concentrations of Western and Israeli tourists, and possibly in Chabad Houses, as well.
In November 2009, the anti-terrorism headquarters announced that it was retracting its travel warning.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplo...-terror-threats-in-india-1.328259

Senior German official urged U.S. to threaten withdrawing its veto on an anti-Israel vote at the UN.
The WikiLeaks website exposé of the inner workings of American diplomacy continued Wednesday, with revelations that Berlin pushed for the U.S. to impose a settlement freeze on Israel.

According to a telegram published by the whistleblowing website, two weeks before Israel's inner cabinet decided on a settlement construction freeze in November 2009, a senior German government official urged the United States to threaten Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he did not agree to a moratorium, Washington would withdraw its support for blocking a vote on the Goldstone Report at the United Nations Security Council.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edit...el-wikileaks-cables-show-1.328127